Sport or Myth?

Ever since “Homo Ludens” we are comfortable to think humans as accustomed to playing. Playing is one of the most complicated activities. And the play is a tradition with long historical roots in shaping the mankind thinking. Nowadays we naturally link plays with theatre and the physical activity called playing with sports. The idea that there is infusion between sport and theatre or the acting/playing co-relation is not new at all and it descents directly from ancient times when amphitheatres held both plays and athletic events.
One of the most influential (at least for me) and one of the most popular point of view regarding the theme is in one of Roland Barthes’ essays in Mythologies - the opening one and one of the most significance,  called “The world of wrestling”( Actually the essay first  appeared in Esprit). In a very punctuating, very exact manner the French structuralist managed to outline the similarities between acting and playing. One of the important conclusions states that wrestlers act with their bodies, that the body is actually a symbol, a representation of meaning. The gesture becomes a signifying act. The idea and the object transform into one thing and that is the Symbol.
What I find interesting in the idea of mixing acting and playing is the way the crowd, the audience observe, witness and most importantly comprehend the spectacle. One of the aims of Barthes’ Mythologies was to expose, denounce ideology and mythology superstitions in modern society thinking.
The post-modern person is even easily captured in influential traps. Engaged with the massive legacy of the past, post-modern person met multiple ends - whether it was the end of the history, the death of the author or modern narratives - it appears that this person doesn’t have arguments anymore with which to construct fundament of now. In a way the post-modern person strives to compensate this non secure weakness by inventing an exaggerated image of self. Margaret Atwood in her book, also of essays, “In other worlds” talks about comic books heroes by Jungian terms, pointing that: “A comic-book character leading a split life and engaged in a battle between Good and Evil might well be expected to show Jungian characteristics”.
Bill Shankly once said that the football is much more than a matter of life and dead. And his words made me think - what brings all of those people at stadiums every weekend, what brings them to exaltation and are these emotions somehow linked with Aristoteles’ term catharsis?

The football-like game/ritual of the Mayans was also a matter of live and dead because the losers of the game were slaughtered in order to please the gods. The point of this game/ritual was the observation of the planets movement. The ancient Chinese also used to practice similar activities. But the modern football was invented in England and the purpose of the game was much more prosaic, simply to entertain. At the very beginning the football game was vicious ramble of fighting bodies. And all the violent emotions released from the “playing” crowd were projected somehow into the audience. During the ages the game became important part of the daily routine.
Nowadays the game is constantly experienced not only during the weekends but the days
after that, revealing more and more details. As Douglas E. Foley says in his book, The
Great American Football Ritual: Reproducing Race, Class, and Gender Inequality - “Football is
more than a game, and it’s more than a revenue generator—it’s a powerful agent of
socialization…Team sports, and especially American football, generally socialize males
to be warriors.”
Another American author, Mark Axelrod, also gives his point of view in an article called
Popular Culture and the Rituals of American Football. Drawing on the thought of Arnold van
Gennep, C.G. Jung, and Mircea Eliade among others, Axelrod raises the ritual of the
sport from the baseness of physical contact and violence to the level of cultural practice,
replete with all the sacred mysteries of any other ritual, past or present.
Basically he reveals the connections between ancient rituals and post - modern thinking. The author believes that the cult of celebrities in the face of football players is an act of compensation of the pre-modern superstitious admiration of gods. “With the advancement in technology and the decreased interest in organized religion,
post-modernists have lost touch with our primitive intuition and, consequently, have apparently lost our need for those symbols and rituals that reflect those intuitive feelings about nature, life, and the cosmos; however, the sacredness that wo/man seems to have lost in a strictly religious sense, has successfully manifested itself in another less obvious but equally sacred way ... Sport.” - he states.
If athletes are our new gods, that explains our starving to create narratives that come close to the myth as a story. Foley fundamentally points that players and nonplayers are constantly engaged in narrating the game -  “Players and nonplayers collectively plot and reveal in mythical feats of revenge.“ or “Folkloric immortality, endless stories about that one great hit in the big game, was what players secretly strove for.”
Every detail of the ritual has its significance and value, every act - its proper meaning. Nevertheless it comes to the symbol meaning of the circled shape of the stadium, or the purchasing of the ticket - everything is part of the Big Story.
Axelrod sees the stadium as “a Sacred Place in Mythic Time - An ordinary place became a sacred one because of the eternal quality of the mystery that first consecrated it”. The spectator becomes part of the myth by simply purchasing a ticket. “Purchasing one's ticket is a rite of participation that allows the buyer/fan/devotee, through the mediation of the ticket, to experience the ritual that follows.”. Once the person enters the stadium he/she is no longer a personality but part of the Ritual. The stadium lives for the team and the team is immortal. Although the players graduate, get injured, quit, retire, or are fired, the team lives on. And as a part of the ritualistic sequence, players are acting out their performances. Highly aware of the fact that every movement of theirs is scrutinized they use their gestures and bodies to pass massages. Some address the crowd with special gestures - pointing to the sky, imitating baby carrying, others limped and ice-packed their injuries and grimaced broadly for all to see.

The audience is hungry for these gestures and electrified by their significance. They are like code universally important in the building of the myth’s structure. The spectacle is something that cannot be missed because every second of it is part of the time captured in the status of the myth. While reading NY Times I was struck by the story of a fan. “Mr. Longstreth, a former City Councilman from Philadelphia who graduated from Princeton in 1941, is always on time (''I once missed 13 points in the first 57 seconds'') and always stays to the end (''even if we're getting thumped''). And he has attended every Princeton game, home or away, for the last 47 years -- more than half his life. ''That's about 450 games,'' he said. ''When it rains, it's not even fun. But I always come, even if I'm sick or it's foul weather, or even when I was running for Mayor.”

The devotion, the constant urge to be part of the ritual, part of the game is kind of a lifestyle for many who attend every single game no matter of the weather conditions. There is nothing that can prevent the fan to see his/her gods.
The win is the absolute goal that is pursuit in every single game, in every challenge. And the lost is rather traumatic experience, source of shame and indignity. The winners always tend to tease and even bully the losers. And that is the great disadvantage of the modern sport - to some extend always manages to draw a line of difference, rises questions of intolerance and separation. Even playing the national anthem is kind of political propaganda that reaches neuralgic spots for the post - modern person.

Works Cited
Atwood, Margaret - In other worlds, Nan A. Talese / Doubleday, NY, 2011
Axelrod, Mark - http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1100&context=clcweb
Barthes, Roland - Mythologies, Harper Collins Canada LTD., 1972
Foley, Douglas -http://www.qcc.cuny.edu/pv_obj_cache/pv_obj_id_EB4CBD6288BD55F5E595F9D8C099751EA0D80200/filename/great-american-football-ritual.pdf